Public media on the media

Two interesting sources for inside-baseball analysis on the media by the media are PBS's mediawatch (part of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) and NPR's On the Media. This week saw some pretty interesting analysis pieces on both programs. Friday's NewsHour included pieces on questions raised by media coverage of the trapped miners in West Virginia (how did the media come to report that 12 miners survived when in fact they had died?) and the Bush administration's domestic spying program (why did the New York Times wait more than a year to break the story?). Inevitably the issues of ethics and journalists' use of sources was front and center. The same can be said of the key items in this week's On the Media, which also deals with the West Virginia mining disaster as well as Bush's leak investigation (over the extralegal wiretap story) and a very interesting backgrounder--originally aired in 2001--about the key role of leaks and leakers in American democracy.